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Touring New York City's Water Filtration Plant

New York City's first and only water filtration plant will sit below a golf course in the Bronx.

Snowfall dusts the construction site of the Croton Water Filtration Plant project, located in Bronx , New York. The Croton system is the oldest of three water systems that provides water to New York City. It delivers approximately 10 percent of the city’s average daily demand for drinking water.

An engineer consults blueprints inside the filtration construction site, which sits on 10 acres of a once and future golf course, located In Van Cortlandt Park. The $2.8 billion infrastructure project is expected to go online in 2012.

One of the massive holding tanks for the chemicals that will treat the raw water, which arrives at the site from deep, underground tunnels connecting reservoirs, some of which are more than 50 miles from the city.

A worker adjusts the installation of one of the 20 ultraviolet units that will disinfect the drinking water. For decades, New York’s water has been so clean that it was one of only five cities not required to filter its drinking water. But new state and federal standards have put the Croton system out of compliance.

One of the massive, five-foot diameter pipes that will move water from one level of the filtration system to another. Because the footprint for the plant is so small, the engineers had to blast down more than 90 feet into bedrock, and then stack the various filtration components on top of each other.

Safety signs inside the construction site, which is a beehive of activity, involving heavy equipment for moving and installing the filtration plant’s various components. All visitors are required to take a 15-minute safety course before entering the plant.

A worker uses a machine to fit pipes. The multilevel plant is laced with more than 66 miles of pipe.

Newly installed ventilation ducts. To maintain proper temperatures inside the plant, workers have installed more than $100 million of HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) ducts throughout the site.

While construction of the plant has continued since it started in 2007, the number of workers has been declining steadily from a peak of nearly 1,300.

A small portion of the elaborate electronic control systems that will automatically run and monitor the numerous components that make up the filtration process.

While construction has taken place largely out of sight, the project has not been without controversy. The local community strongly opposed construction of the plant because of its location in one corner of Van Cortlandt Park, the only open space for the more than 28,000 residents who live nearby.

Several of the plant’s 48 filtration tanks. The plant will have the capacity for processing and filtering 290 million gallons of drinking water daily.

The filtration plant is the largest of its kind in the United States. Funding for the project is paid for with water and sewer bonds.

Workers inside the plant’s cavernous passageways, some of which are 650 feet long.

Bernard Daly (facing camera), the construction site’s executive construction manager, prepares to enter the tunnel that will connect the plant with the aqueduct that delivers water from the upstate reservoirs.

Inside the water tunnel, which was bored-out by a special machine that cut a 13-foot circumference hole in the bedrock. Metal piping now lines the face of the rock, reducing the circumference to its final size of 9 feet.

Working inside the 8,000 foot-long water tunnel. The men (and women) who work in this deep, underground environment are known as “sandhogs.” Their work is considered so unusual there’s even a sandhog reality show: http://pilgrimfilms.tv/shows/sandhogs/

The only way to reach the water tunnel is by climbing inside a small cage, which is hoisted by a large crane and then lowered more than 90 feet down a narrow shaft.

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